Barry Schwartz, author of the book The Paradox of Choice, has some insight and research into how people make choices and filter the number of choices they have.

I’m interested in the ramifications of Barry’s book on information architecture and website design.
In a nutshell, the author asserts that we’ve always thought people should have more choices rather than fewer yet his research is saying there’s a point at which too many choices can be paralyzing.

From the Boxes and Arrows interview with Barry…

Barry Schwartz: In 50 years of research and psychology, there is study after study showing that people who are able to choose X were more satisfied than people who simply got X. But in all of those studies, the contrast was always with two options. And if two options are better than no choice, then three must be better than two, and four must be better than three, and so on. But no one ever studied that. The empirical basis for the idea is that the more choice people have, the better they are. And it seems perfectly reasonable.

What economist have said, more as a matter of theory than as a matter of empirical evidence, is that if you add options, you can’t make anyone any worse off. If you’re happy alternating between Cheerios and Rice Krispies, you can just keep doing that. And, if I add 50 other cereals, you’ll ignore them. And if I don’t like Cheerios and Rice Krispies, chances are that one of those 50 cereals that have been added will be just the ticket.

Adding options is bound to make somebody better off, and further, it won’t make anybody worse off. The more choice people have, the better they are. So how could it not be true?

It’s not true.

But it’s only in the last five years that people have started doing research where instead of having two options, people have 20 or 200. And when you cross a line (and you are probably going to ask me “where’s the line?” and I’m going to say, ”I don’t know; nobody knows”), choice goes from being beneficial to being paralyzing. So one effect of too many choices is that people can’t choose at all…

The consistent problem in all of this is that people don’t know what’s good for them. If you offer people a limited range of options and a large set, most people will choose the large set. They’ll go and try to pick something, and they’ll walk out empty handed shaking their heads. So everyone’s kind of swallowed the ideology that more is better than less.

Read the full interview on Boxes and Arrows >>
Watch the Google video of Barry’s talk at Google >>

The W3C published a set of best practices on how to improve the User Experience of mobile web content. That is a relevant approach, since the mobile web content at the moment has a very varied quality especially from the usability and the accessibility point of view.

Users seem to be happy (and sometimes surprised) about being able to access any site from their mobiles, mostly because they are used to more limited access though a portal provided by their operators. But in the long run, this ‘happiness’ or ‘being surprised’ is not enough - when the mobile web is accessed by masses, the user experience of the content needs to be improved and more uniform.

(Via S60 Blog.)

Telecom Asia “With more advanced services rolling out across the planet, ease-of-use is becoming crucial to their success, but today’s user interfaces aren’t quite cutting it. Solving that will be a complex task, but the place to start is the users - not just by asking them what they want in future, but what they’re doing with their handsets now

As the mobile industry moves toward more advanced non-voice services, from MMS and instant messaging to mobile TV and video calls, the underlying mantra for manufacturers, operators and apps developers alike has been a strikingly contradictory one: offer simple, easy-to-use services using mind-bogglingly complex technology. That means shielding the user from all that state-of-the-art wizardry behind the scenes, and making any new service appear as though it’s so simple even your Luddite great-uncle could figure it out - ideally without once having to consult a manual.”

A November 2005 study of 6,800 consumers in Europe and Asia from mobile device management company SmartTrust declared that users trying to keep up with the latest features and services were suffering from “mobile service fatigue.” Report author and SmartTrust comms manager Tim De Luca-Smith said that poor handset configuration and network settings were contributing heavily to slow take-up of services like MMS.